The Dictionary of Lost Words at Dunstan Playhouse

After delighting audiences and critics alike in sold out seasons in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, our highest and fastest selling show in the history of the Dunstan Playhouse returns to Adelaide as part of a wider national tour throughout 2025.

Lovingly adapted by South Australian playwright Verity Laughton from Pip Williams’ acclaimed bestseller, The Dictionary of Lost Words is back.

In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. The Dictionary of Lost Words is the story of the girl who found it.

A multi-award winner, the book has been praised by critics as an “absorbing, quietly revolutionary novel” (The Age) and
“a captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded” (The New York Times).

Motherless and ever curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium – the “Scrippy”, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. She hides beneath the table and catches discarded words as they fall – words the men find irrelevant and unimportant … female words. Here begins Esme’s collection of her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words.

As the years pass and Esme’s world expands and her circle of friends grows – actresses, suffragettes, market traders, workers, she realises the power in gathering their voices, and lending hers. And on the way, she comes to understand the many meanings of the word “love”.